Layla DeBerg

Name: Layla DeBerg

Gender: Female

Age: 19

Grade: 12

School: George Hunter Highschool

Hobbies and Interests: Crime fiction, thrillers, horror movies, watching stand-up comedy, blogging, school radio, school newspaper

Appearance: Layla stands at 5’7” and her weight is 142 pounds. Her hair is chocolate brown and cut into a dice bob. Her eyes are brown in colour, she has a protruding chin, a button nose and thin lips.

Her height, her strong jawline and some blemishes on her right cheek give her a mature and aged look, so she might appear to strangers to be older than she is. This is emphasized even more so with her black-framed glasses she’s constantly wearing.

In her free time and in school she is usually wearing hoodies and sweaters. When visiting shows or formal events she is often wearing dresses. On the day of the abduction, she was wearing a black Overwatch pullover hoodie with a white t-shirt underneath, paired with blue denims and brown Uggs.

Biography: Layla DeBerg was born to Daniel and Alexandra DeBerg, two journalists that met through work, started seeing each other and eventually married. Sadly Daniel died from Renal cell carcinoma when Layla was five years old.

Layla had been a bookworm since she was able to read, having collected a ton of books as a child; she preferred collecting them over lending from a library because she liked her big personal collection. Both of her parents were book fanatics and had a large book collection themselves, so they taught her to read when she was little and would read books to her or give her children's books like Wizard of Oz to her as gifts.

At the age of twelve she received a collection of all Sherlock Holmes stories as a birthday gift from her aunt. She enjoyed it a lot and delved more into crime fiction and thrillers. She is currently more invested in these kind of novels instead of fantasy books, romance novels, or sci-fi novels, which were the type of novels she used to read all the time but nowadays they bore her because of the repetitive story structures and tropes. Her favourite book series is Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti series, as it was one of the first crime novel series she read.

Expanding her horizons, she searched for books on the internet and discovered more books she wanted to read on Wikipedia. She also discovered the website Goodreads, where she at first watched out for the hottest and highest-rated novels and eventually also created an account to share her thoughts on books she read, as she didn’t have anyone to share these with. She also discovered a lot of well-rated novels ranging from well-received dark thrillers of Nordic noir or extreme psycho-thrillers by John Katzenbach.

Leaving reviews was not enough and she started to create a blog dedicated to book reviews where she’d share her thoughts on books she read but also from requested books. The numbers of her followers grew and she eventually found mind-alikes in the blogging community.

Layla had never been a fan of horror books; she’d read H.P. Lovecraft and found his work to be confusing, surreal and not engaging at all. Oddly, however, she turned out to like watching horror movies. She quickly became a fan of old horror movies like the Halloween series, SAW or A Nightmare at Elm Street, as they were extremely thrilling, visual and cinematographically well done.

Another hobby of hers is watching stand-up comedy shows, a hobby she shares with her mother. They have been to The Comedy Catch, a local comedy venue, several times, and once her mother bought her a ticket to visit the Nashville Comedy Festival. Outside of visiting live shows they like texting each other comedy clips of stand-up comedians from YouTube. Layla also sometimes watches bootlegged comedy shows in her free time.

Encouraged by her mother and her parent's work, Layla decided to try and take up journalism at school. She has been part of the school newspaper since sixth grade and enjoys writing articles for it. Through her work at the paper, Layla has learned to write quicker and to organise her schedule to meet deadlines for her newspaper job in addition to homework, her blog, and other activies. She also gave school radio a shot, which was similiar to the newspaper in terms of having to write for it, just with an audio project instead of visual. She enjoys to work with the radio people, though she prefers to write for the newspaper, as she considers that to be her forte, as she is rather self-conscious about her voice and performance.

Unsurprisingly, Layla does well in school when it comes to language classes like English or Spanish and has a reputation of being a good student in those subjects. Unfortunately she is not doing well in other classes where she is getting Cs. She understands what she has to do and can pass exams, but is not passionate enough about maths, science classes and physical education. Alexandra worries about Layla as she seems to be disinterested in learning and school, but can’t finance a tutor to change how Layla’d been doing.

In 11th grade Layla managed to fail multiple exams. Layla had been already nervous about the final exams; she procrastinated to learn and slacked off heavily. She normally was not much of a gamer, having played with some of her friends here and there, but during that year she had discovered Overwatch through a YouTuber she really liked watching playing it which made her try it out. She became addicted to the game and it helped her cope with the stress induced by the exams. However she was too distracted, and she failed most of her exams.

Layla felt bad about that and her mum also did not take the news lightly, being very disappointed. This lead to her feeling insecure about her intelligence and she began to envy her schoolmates for being more well-versed academically. Layla regrets having spent more time on a video game and her blog than learning.

After graduating she plans to go into journalism. She has already applied at the University of Tennessee to study Communication & Journalism. She’s excited to learn about journalism as she loves to write and to find out more about the world. Layla has previously worked in the school newspapers and the school radio as a reference. Layla plans to work in the print media in the future, because she thinks journalists in that area are needed. If that doesn't work out, her plan B would be to work in a less dead business like in radio or television.

Advantages: Layla is a book-smart student whose broad knowledge will keep her open to conversations she will be having on the island.

Disadvantages: She is a slacker who might not be ambitious enough to outlive her classmates. She is also feeling insecure about herself.

Designated Number: Female student No. 051

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Designated Weapon: Swordbreaker

Conclusion: G051's weapon isn't the best, but it also isn't bad, either. I think she has a chance, so long as she solidifies her resolve and puts her smarts to proper use. - Boris Petrikov

'The above biography is as written by Sh4dE. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Sh4dE

Kills: 

Killed By: Violet Schmidt

Collected Weapons: Swordbreaker (assigned weapon)

Allies: 

Enemies: Ron Kiser, Colin McCabe, Violet Schmidt

Mid-game Evaluation: 

Post-Game Evaluation: 

Memorable Quotes:

Threads
Below are a list of threads containing Layla, in chronological order:

The Trip: V7:
 * Room 804: I Want Wind To Blow
 * Why not me?
 * Gotta Fake It 'Til You Make It
 * Here. Fear. Here.
 * Sun Giant

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Layla DeBerg. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Layla's handler has made an art out of playing improbable character traits and unconventional narrative elements to the hilt, and in V7 found significant success doing just that. With the willingness to throw caution to the wind, however, comes the very real risk that things actually won't work out, and I would say that Layla is unfortunately a pretty big example of this in action.

Layla's narrative is spare, blunt, and almost entirely focused on her goals of the moment. This isn't so different from Benny, say, but while Benny is interested in rallying the class together, Layla seemingly wants to survive and sees playing hard as the way to do it. This leaves her a serious throwback; like the villains of yore, she roams from thread to thread picking fights without any time being spent on why she does any given thing or how she's feeling outside of her basest, most immediate goals—and with a single post of Pregame written in much the same way, there's not much outside material to contextualize things either. The thing is, a big part of why this all fell out of style is that it makes it super hard to connect with or care about the character in any notable way, and at the same time the quick, choppy fight beats read as far more functional than carefully-crafted for an exciting reading experience. Gervais saw shades of this same issue prior to his adoption, but he was to an extent rescued by his thread partners, who brought a lot more spin and style to the fights to pick up the slack. Layla never really achieved that sort of chemistry.

Really, I think the core trouble that Layla ran into was that her posts never quite found the beats they needed. Ultra-minimal posts can work, but I usually favor them as an occasional spice rather than the whole meal. Whatever the case, they need to pack a ton of punch because they're doing the work of significantly more writing from others; if they don't pull that off, they can fall between the cracks of other people spending more time on interiority, staging, and voice. Arjen reliably found those perfect moments, somehow always pulling out just the right outrageous line of dialogue or cutting mental observations to complicate the scene or have me in stitches. Layla, however, didn't have that sort of voice or narrative charisma, which left her writing purely dry and functional, without a lot to really get invested in. RC has some really great characters, overall and in V7 specifically, including one I'll talk about very soon who is to this day one of the highlights of the entire version for me, but I feel like Layla's narrative never figured out what it wanted to do and her voice just did not come together, leaving her a blast from the past and a curiosity but not one that's going to change many minds about the evolution of players. - MurderWeasel